NSA snooping creates a boon for foreign tech competitors

One of the only bright spots in the US economy is high tech, particularly internet-related businesses. But thanks to the close collaboration between tech giants like Google and the NSA spying apparatus, a significant opening is being created for foreign competitors to erode our competitive advantage. Elizabeth Dwoskin and Frances Robinson write in the Wall Street Journal:
Three of Germany's largest email providers, including partly state-owned Deutsche Telekom AG, DTE.XE -0.28% teamed up to offer a new service, Email Made in Germany. The companies promise that by encrypting email through German servers and hewing to the country's strict privacy laws, U.S. authorities won't easily be able to pry inside. More than a hundred thousand Germans have flocked to the service since it was rolled out in August.
Politicians outside the U.S. are pushing new data-privacy rules in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations.
"We can say that we protect the email inbox according to German law," says...(Read Full Post)